Eating burnt sheep's head

We'd booked a lunch
at Smalahovetunet, for two
reasons. One was that they served the local delicacy smalahove, which
really is burnt, smoked sheep's head. The other was that they'd
promised to serve us traditional Voss home brew with the food. So we
drove the 8 kilometers from Voss up to the farm, in an idyllic setting
by the lake in the middle of the valley above Voss. (This is part 2
of the Norwegian farmhouse ale trip.)

Our host, Ivar Løne, took us to a gorgeous old wooden
building, a food storehouse dating from the 18th century. There he
brought us an ølkjenge, a wooden beer bowl, filled with home
brew. And there it was again! That citrusy
aroma of kveik, this time blended in with some
banana and alcohol. It had a clear family resemblance
to Sigmund's beer, without being the same.

Martin checking the beer

Then, Ivar took us off to see the brewery, in a small cellar
underneath one of the houses. The similarities with Sigmund's brewery
were striking, but this one was clearly older. Here, the huge copper
kettle hung on chains over an open fireplace. The steel buckets, the
garden hose, the steel serving tank. All this was pretty much the
same. Even the fermentation vessels looked much the same, but Ivar
had two of them, both busily fermenting away.

We asked Ivar how he brewed, and quickly established that the
basics were the same as with Sigmund. He uses juniper infusion, and
ferments at roughly 38C, using his own strain of kveik. He boils for
3-4 hours and says initially, if you take a ladle of wort you can't
see the bottom of the ladle. After 1.5 hours of boiling the wort in
the ladle begins to clear, and after three hours it will be pretty
much bright and clear. He seems to only mash for one hour.

The kveik at work

And then, in an aside, he lets slip that in Hardanger there are
also home brewers using kveik. "And there people say it's 350 years
old," he adds. This is fantastic news, except that after
the initial research we decided to skip
Hardanger as not interesting enough. So we're going north from Voss,
away from the kveik. This is intensely frustrating, but there's
nothing we can do about it now.

Ivar then took us back to the old storehouse, this time going
inside. We sat down at the rough-hewn wooden benches and tables, and
waited. Soon, Ivar showed up again, with three steaming halves of
sheep's head in a wooden tray. The heads seem shrunken and wrinkly
from the water, yet fatty, and disconcertingly head-like. Seemingly
empty eye sockets stared at us, although we were soon to learn that
they were anything but.

Ready to eat

And there I am. A sheep's head is lying on my plate, its jaw bones
protruding out of what was once the mouth. I poke at it, not sure
where to begin, so Ivar takes over. He expertly flips open the eye
socket, takes out the eye, removes the black bit in the front, then
puts in on the plate. Quickly, to stop myself from thinking too much
about what I'm doing, I put the eye in my mouth, and chew. To my
surprise, it's not slimy at all, but soft and chewy, rather like fat.
It doesn't really taste of anything special.

Emboldened by this discovery, I start on the head itself. The meat
is tender, almost falling to pieces, after having been boiled for
hours. It tastes recognizably like mutton, with a delicate smoked
character. Martin is really taken with the smoke flavour, and
immediately starts wondering what sort of wood they've used. We
quickly forget what it is we are eating and tuck in, because this
really is delicious.

Tastes a lot better than it looks

We're served home brew to go with the food, and the beer nicely
complements the food. I can pay more attention to the beer this time
around, and notice a clear juniper presence all the way through. The
beer is kind of sweet, with no carbonation. At the beginning the
citrus and banana character from the kveik dominates, but gradually
that fades, to be replaced by juniper and alcohol, even solvent. It's
a good beer, and very unlike anything else I've had. As with Sigmund's
beer, the beer really seemed dominated by the kveik character. The
closest equivalent in flavour I can think of is Finnish sahti, but the
yeast profile in that is not nearly as pleasant, probably because of
the bread yeast they use. This is also clearly stronger than sahti.

We work our way through the heads, which are actually just halves
of a head, eating jaw muscles, ears, the top of the snout, the tongue,
and so on. By now this feels totally natural, and I have no qualms
about eating sheep's head. Once we've finished, Ivar's wife takes away
the remains of the sheep's heads, then brings us new trays of
pinnekjøtt and sausage. We burst out laughing. We'd completely
forgotten that we ordered the menu that had both smalahove and other
dishes, so the Canadians could get to try various types of traditional
food. By now we're full to bursting and really hadn't planned to eat
any more.

The beer

After a quick discussion we agree that if we skip dinner, for which
we have no plans anyway, we could perhaps squeeze in some more. And we
do. Martin takes one bite of pinnekjøtt and immediately
exclaims "this is the same wood! It's smoked with the same type of
wood! I have to find out what this is." We ask, and are told that in
Voss, everything is smoked with alder wood, which does indeed give a
very characteristic aroma.

After we've eaten as much meat as we feel is safe, Ivar's wife
takes away the remains, and comes back with cake and coffee. We start
laughing all over again. Cake? How are we going to find room for cake?
Eventually we squeeze down a token amount, to avoid giving offense,
then sit groaning quietly for a while.

The nightmare machine

The comes the final event: the visit to the smalahove factory. We
stagger down to another part of the farm, where there's a big
warehouse-like building. Inside is a bizarre contraption, like a
merry-go-round, except it's all sooty steel, and what goes round are
sheep's heads impaled on metal poles coming out their nostrils. This
already looks pretty odd, but then Ivar's son starts the machine. The
heads start going round, as expected, but then they stop in front of
rows of odd-looking cylinders.

Suddenly, the cylinders spew blue and yellow flame, totally
enveloping the heads. In their now-blackened faces, bits of wool glow
red. I lift my camera and start shooting pictures of white teeth in
black faces, grinning in gruesome smiles, bathed in bright yellow
flame. It's like a dream-vision of an industrialized hell for sheep.
Then the flames stop, the heads move one step around the machine, and
the heads are scoured by rotating steel brushes, scraping the burnt
wool from their faces. The scraping stops, the heads move another
position, and the flamethrowers let rip again.

The purpose of this process is to remove the wool without flaying
the heads. Exactly why they don't simply flay the heads I can't really
say. Other places in the country they flay them instead.

Once you've seen it, you won't forget it

Our guide takes another head, poses for us with it, then sticks it
in another machine, pulls a lever, making a crunching sound. Now he
can tear the head in half with his fingers, and point to the various
parts inside, explaining what's eaten and what not. From here, the
heads go to the smokehouse, where chips of alder wood are kept
smoldering to produce the smoke. Once smoked, the head can be stored
for a good while before being eaten.

Smalahovetunet is actually the only place in Norway with a license
from the food safety authority to produce smalahove. So they make
70,000 heads a year. That's 140,000 portions. If you buy smalahove in
Norway, it comes from Smalahovetunet. You can see why they need a
machine, and in fact the machine was built specifically because they
were struggling to produce enough smalahove the traditional way.

Scraping

Later, Ivar tells us that the machine was designed by a local
artist. Which makes total sense, because while obviously functional,
you could put it in a contemporary art museum as an exhibit for the
industrialization of food processing, and the inherent barbarity of
producing food from animal bodies. When we visit him to taste the beer
we brewed, Sigmund tells us a little more. The designer, Leif Gjerme,
was a friend of his, and he worked as both an inventor and an artist.
He was not an engineer, and knew very little maths, so he did no
drawings, but instead visualized the entire machine in his head.
Complete with wirings, hydraulic pipes and pumps, the timing of the
various parts, etc etc. He did this so thoroughly that when he built
the prototype, it worked on the first attempt.

Stuffed, happy, and slightly dazed, we go back to Ivar's wife to
settle the bill. And now we discover that we don't actually pay for
the beer, only for the food and the tour. We're told that they do have
approval from the food safety authority for producing the beer, but
the tax regime for selling beer is so complicated and cumbersome that
they have decided not to even try selling it.

We consider this silently. The Ratebeer database has more than
265,000 different beers. Of those 1 is made with kveik. If someone
travels to Voss to try what is by far the most unique food product in
Voss, and one of the most unique beers on earth, they will find that
they cannot buy it. The only option is a massive dinner, booked for a
group in advance, with the beer thrown in for free. If you remember to
ask for it.